Our Impact

For more than a decade, Celina Kleer, M.D., Harold A. Oberman Collegiate Professor of Pathology and director of the Breast Pathology Program at the U-M Cancer Center, has been studying how a poorly understood protein called CCN6 affects breast cancer. To learn more about its role in breast cancer development, Kleer's lab designed a special mouse model that deleted CCN6 from the mammary gland in mice, which allowed the team to study effects specific to the loss of the protein. The results, recently published in Oncogene, have revealed a key genetic driver for a rare form of metaplastic breast cancer.

It's a pretty obvious connection - those who exercise more often are less susceptible to disease. But how exactly does a man’s aerobic capacity affect his chances of suffering a spontaneous heart attack? And how does a woman’s running ability impact her brain function? U-M researchers have developed a unique rat model that provides scientists worldwide with a significant resource to study how exercise endurance capacity correlates with disease risks.

Who gets hooked on drugs and who stays clean? New research, conducted in rats, identifies genetic markers that influence addiction.

Children with brain tumors have had limited treatment options in the past compared with adults. A novel research model, developed in mice at U-M, will make it easier and faster to test new treatments.

It was thought to be strange and risky in the 1970s, but research with sheep paved the way to a new machine that gave critically-ill patients with failing hearts and lungs a chance for their organs to rest and repair themselves. To date: 50,000 patients treated; more than 2,000 of them right here at U-M, and thousands of lives saved.

U-M researchers are using the regenerative properties of zebrafish to develop novel strategies for treating blinding eye diseases.

Scientists and doctors have long wanted to know how much insulin a person has, but haven't been able to know the exact amount without physically removing the pancreas from a deceased patient for review. But a new study in the journal Diabetes details how a group of researchers was finally able to visualize stored insulin in the pancreas of a living creature -- in this case, a mouse.

A small device implanted under the skin can improve breast cancer survival by catching cancer cells, slowing the development of metastatic tumors in other organs and allowing time to intervene with surgery or other therapies. The study, done in mice, expands on earlier research from the same team of U-M researchers that showed that the implantable scaffold device effectively captures metastatic cancer cells.

"We love animals, and we love people, and that's why we do the job we do."

Since the 1950s, animal studies have shown that pretreatment of the gut with antibiotics before trauma or other critical illness can protect against lung injury and death. As part of their recently published findings in Nature Microbiology, U-M researchers have concluded that critical illness involving the lungs has more to do with disruptions to the body's natural population of microbes, or microbiome, than previously thought.